Dressing the Stones

Tomorrow it's time to dress the stanes—something my grannie taught me to do—except in California, the stones are natural outcroppings—remnants of limestone reefs. But sometimes I wonder of some of monoliths got a little help along the way. 

We have a huge limestone outcropping on our hill in Forest Knolls that's like a long tooth sticking out at an angle. You can stand on top of it and stand suspended in space—and it's a long way down as the slope is  steeper than the angle of declination. 

There are also myriad other outcroppings in West Marin that will suffice as Old World Neolithic stones. I will post some images soon.

Bantry, where my grannie was from, is loaded with standing stones, and stone circles. So this urge to dress the stones is a long-standing tradition, if you'll pardon the pun. It's a bit of an obsession, almost like an ancient calling. I can't explain it.


I was relieved to note that they still dress the stones in Scotland. One New Year we dressed an ice age geologic erratic, supposedly a druid judgement rocking stone in that it once rocked in the wind (whether yea or nay, we don't know) called Cloch-na-Ryderik (stone of king Rhy—Derik—Roderik).

Clochoderick on Crossflat Farm Road off the Beith Road (A737), near Castle Semple, in Renfewshire, Scotland, is supposedly the burial place of Rhydderch Hael, King of Strathclyde. 

The name of the stone tells me Rhydderch was a Briton, not Dalriada Irish. The region is an admixture of the two peoples. Most place names are in Irish, Like Beith—but not who the stone was named after. However, the orthography is Irish: cloch na (rhy)derick. Stone of the king Derick.

The Castle Semple and folly, or hunting tower, and a wooded ring (possible remains of a standing stone circle) all triangluate to suggest there was once an important pre-Celtic Neolithic site here.

Up the road is where the Houston (better known as the Barochan Cross in Paisley Abbey) and the Arthurlie stones were found. How many Neolithic standing stones were converted into crosses?

There are also what looks to be a series of rings (and a possible ringfort) by Skiff Wood above Howood but I couldn't figure out how to get to it. 

But somebody beat us to it and left it a bouquet of holly and red roses at Clochoderick. We left it old silver coins in the cracks and gave it a little uisge beatha—I had to stop Neil from practically drowning the poor stone! Waste of good Glenlivet, I said.

That winter, I dragged Neil all over the place—we founds stones in places where he had explored as a child growing up in Renfrewshire, but had no knowledge of. In those days, trespassing was frowned upon—replete with fines and guns. With Scotland's new land access laws, we trespassed with impunity.

I was pretty excited when we found the Arthurlie Stone in a suburb of Barrhead, there's another standing stone (the Barochan Cross) converted into a cross in the Paisley Abbey—from Houston, Scotland (not TX). There's a few odd stone formations up at Robertson Car Park too. Hard to tell if it's natural nor not. This area was heavily glaciated. Amazing what you can find in aerial view on on GoogleEarth.

We also dressed a (modern/restructured) standing stone monument near Irvine, Ayrshire—sometimes called the Sorlie Stones at the Toll Girdle crossroad, Whether the stones were there before the coal mines decimated the area, and moved, only to be reconstructed when the land was reclaimed, is an arguable point. 

The Toll Girdle /Sorlie Stones (there's the remains of another stone circle nearby in the middle of a housing project which also may have also been called the Sorlie Stones) were reputed to point the way to Paisley Abbey. There's an estate nearby and people were mad for antiquities and follies, so anything is possible. Whether old or new, the stones are magnificent.

That winter I introducing Neil to the ancient Celtic custom of dressing the stones. Red berries, evergreens (holly & mistletoe), whisky, flame/smoke—a candle will do. Perhaps a song or a poem or two—especially after the whisky—which you pour down the back of your own throat after the rock has had its share.

Yes, there were some amazing photos, but some of those pix were lost when my SD card failed (I dropped the SD card on the floor as I was transferring photos). The low resolution back-up photos I took on Neil's Sony HandiCam—were also lost when a hard drive failed. 

But I have hope that I'll find them on some old hard drives someday. I was always backing things up. So it's a matter of finding the time to hunt them down. But the ones on the SD card are gone forever. I even tried recovery software—it only recovered the photos I already had.

Sometimes the memory of the event will just have to do.